Posted
by
timothy
on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:59PM
from the child-prodigy dept.

GreyWolf3000 writes "As this notice in tinderbox shows, Mozilla turns five years old today. A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use. The trunk is feature frozen for the upcoming alpha release for 1.4. Can't wait to see what's in store next!" Read on for another odometer reading -- Mozilla's 200,000th bug report, perhaps just as auspicious a landmark.

zzxc writes "The 200,000th bug has been filed in Mozilla's bugzilla, MozillaZine reports. It was filed at 5:11pm EDT. (21:11GMT) The bug, which is already 'verified invalid,' is 'MailNews crashes after extremely long 'joke of the day' html spam mail.' This comes on the 5 year anniversery of the release of Netscape's source code, also reported by MozillaZine. Bug 100000 was opened on 9/16/01 after three years of development, while bug 200000 comes in less than 19 months from the previous milestone."

I know you're joking but for those that haven't had the thrill of working a debug queue, 200000 is the number of bugs submitted. However, a lot of these are duplicate submissions, not bugs, fixed etc. Not to say there AREN'T bugs in Mozilla but I'd bet any amount of money anyone is willing to put up that there aren't 200000 distinct bugs.

When mozilla was 100%, pure, un-cut vaporware? Everyone (including myself) looked forward to it with stary-eyed hope. I have to admit that I didn't think much would come of it. I was also kinda annoyed with the "kitchen sink" scenario of mozilla, although otherwise I liked the tabbed browsing and cookie & pop-up blocking.

then came Phoenix. Much smaller, I think somewhat faster and it works with sites that mozilla (for whatever reason, I don't know) wouldn't work with - First USA online [firstusa.com] was my pers

I couldn't agree more. As a software engineer with ~15 years experience... and a BA in Philosophy.

Indeed, I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.

(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.

This project has proven several things about large scale open source projects:

- Open source doesnt necessarily mean "instant development". It took over a year before anything useful came of the project.

- Just because you release something as open source, doesnt mean that thousands will flock and provide free development. Though thousands did flock, as soon as they saw that the code wasnt nearly usable, they gave up immediately. But, now that there is a small core of developers working on it, it is a useful product.

- Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it. It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate... There is no company to go out of business to cause Mozilla to disappear.

I think this can be said about most open source programs, they will take longer to be designed, developed, and distributed. A lot of these projects are not being chased by hard datelines, downsizing, higher up pressure. These projects are most for the love of open source, and most importantly the availability of time from the coders.

What makes you think it ever meant that? GNU C and GNU C++ took years to catch up with the respective standards. Emacs 19 took so long to come out that it was a standing joke. So what? That's not the point. Open source software development is slow, but it's steady, and an open source software package keeps on living as long as it has users.

Just because you release something as open source, doesnt mean that thousands will flock and provide fr

If Netscape software had remained closed source, it would have disappeared with AOL's absorption of Netscape.

That's exactly what's happened to Netscape servers (former "Fast Track", Later "iPlanet"). Their code is closed and their usages is limited by AOL and Sun. If Netscape would open the source code of servers as well, today it would be much broader used web-server platform with lots of money due to potential demand for support.

Those days Netscape web application server has been beating IIS and othe

I don't see many situations where people actually SAY they appreciate all the effort behind the code, but since Mozilla was released with tabbed browsing, it has become probably the one app that I use the most. It's not 100% perfect (nothing really is), but it's a damn fine job. *I* appreciate it. : )

> Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it. It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate... There is no company to go out of business to cause Mozilla to disappear.

It'll also be harder for closed-source to compete on a feature-by-feature basis.

I used 3.01 (!) for years because it was vastly easier (but still required a dropdown) to toggle image loading and Javashit; the options required a dropdown and single-tab menu. Inconvenient, bu

Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it.

What competition? Netscape and Opera have about the same market share as Mozilla with respect to Internet Explorer, i.e. not much at all.

It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate...

There has to be something to eliminate first. As of right now Mozilla isn't infringing on Internet Explorer's territory in any way that is either worrying Microsoft or causing a sweeping change in the way websites

As of right now Mozilla isn't infringing on Internet Explorer's territory in any way that is either worrying Microsoft or causing a sweeping change in the way websites are designed.

The first point here doesn't bother me so much as it would have some years ago, but the second point is bothering me. Looking at the browser stats of visitors to my two websites, I'm seeing a wider variety of web browsers than ever before. This is a good thing, and is something we wanted five years ago, but better late than ne

What else annoys me, is if you speak to these web developers and their answer is that "people should just use IE". "IE is the standard" they say. They actually seem to get annoyed at their visitors for not using IE, because it makes more work for them.

"...debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use..."
Not wanting to rain on their parade, as I agree that Mozilla is a great project, but isn't the only reason they have succeeded building a "large scale project" because of the significant backing of one company (Netscape/AOL)? While the community certainly had a very significant contribution, I think we might be giving it a little more credit than it is due.

The guys at KDE have written their own browser with no company backing them...

Indeed. When you think about it, they've actually gone the opposite direction of Mozilla in that sense. Mozilla was initiated by a company, and picked up by the open source community. Konqueror was initiated by the open source community, and picked up by a company [apple.com].:)

My Dad. Hated popups. Instead of giving him a popup blocker for IE I just installed Mozilla for him and switched his Outlook to Mozilla Mail/News. It did a fine job of importing his contact list. He got nimda through an email which infected his machine when he was using Outlook, so I explained to him that with MozMail he'd be ok. After several months use he loves it. No more bad popups for him while browsing, and email has been just fine.

That's my only personal success story, maybe if I got out more often;-). I did turn a few people online to Phoenix and Mozilla with some luck though. I guess it's easier to convert those you personally know... so go celebrate 5 years and convert some more people over!

When I first got here there where several websites that people had been having problems with and had been blaming "the network". Well of course on my first day the first thing I did was install Mozilla. After that we where testing with the problem child websites and for whatever reason Mozilla worked *much* better than IE, no one before me had thought of testing with it. With that wedge in the door I started testing with and promoting Mozilla every

Thanks for calling bullshit, but I must be mistaken then. He DID in fact get a virus through email, nimda was the first thing that sounded familiar though. Whatever it was, it was one of those "popular" (read: highly infected around the world) email trojan/virus things.

He doesn't run IIS on his machine, it's just a simple desktop he uses to surf the web, do some work on, and do email.

OTOH, Mozilla's performance is abysmal on Windows. It takes long to start up and responds slowly to mouse clicks. This is the case not only with my computer but also that of my friends. I get instant response and rendering from IE. It could well be that Windows somehow hampers Mozilla's functioning. Or it could just be that the XUL/JS combination in Mozilla's UI needs to be speeded up. I wish I could use Mozilla with the same speed and for the same purposes that I use it on Linux, but I have no idea why per

I hereby eat my own words. Moz 1.3 does indeed have much of the responsiveness issue fixed - opening new tabs is no slower than opening subwindows in any other application. I think I will have to re-evaluate Mozilla for daily use.

Two Opera features I wish Moz had (if anyone can point out add-ons, I'd be thrilled):

Saving windows - if Opera crashes or is closed accidentally, it can save all the windows you had open and re-open them all. This is great when you have twenty windows open, and accidentally cl

"You're the liar. Mozilla doesn't necessarily load on startup, only if you keep that crappy tray icon activated. And that slows down the startup procedure something chronic. So you get to pick where you want your slowdown - when you start the computer, or when you start the browser. I prefer the browser option, since it's a bit more 'honest' about where the speed problems are."

IE does the same thing what's the big deal? The only difference is that you have no choice with IE. You have to load it up with win

My wife is a computer tutor, specializing in Seniors. Usually the first thing she'll do in install Mozilla.

Between blocking popups, and making the web not look like any other window, it seems to be a lot easier for older folks to use. Most of her clients are loaded and call her after being completely stumped by XP, so performance is rarely an issue.

Oh yes, the tabs! I forgot to mention how I showed him how they work. He loves that instead of having a bunch of IE windows open. He has caught onto tabbed browsing quite well and control of opening mutliple news stories to read.

I see some negative comments, and I guess I expect some here. But I am quite pleased with Mozilla. It has some nice features, and it has them for free. Spam filtering, pop-up stopper, and on and on.

The fact is, I needed a browser and email client that is *more* than spartan to replace what I was using, and for mail that was an OS/2 program. With all that Mozilla Mail has, the OS/2 program still has a feature or two I'd like to see added to Mozilla.

But the bigger thing is that for Microsoft to be displaced to any degree, the software that does it *has* to be blessed with good features. I has to be more than spartan. And like IE, which really isn't free, Mozilla not only gives the impression of free, but *is* free. And 'free' is also required for sucess.

A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Mozilla since it's finally become 1.0, and having switched from IE I wouldn't go back. But (and here's the catch) it still crashes on me a few times a week. After 5 years you'd think they could make a program that's actually stable.

That's just strange. It *hardly ever* crashes for me, and I usually have at least 5 or 6 tabs open, sometimes other windows too. It crashed once last week, but I think that's the only time in the last month or so.

Mozilla is a great success, but it is also a great failure. When Netscape first open sourced Mozilla development they were disallusioned. They assumed that developers would flock to the open source development effort. Netscape was looking to win the browser war without spending any money. Not being able to compete against a free product, they were looking at ways to make their product free. It didn't work. Mozilla has only succeeded today becouse Netscape (now AOL) continues to pour money into the project. Most development on the browser is still done by paid employees.

Mozilla's successes have almost all been side effects. An open bug database is one of the most revolutionary development practices that I have ever seen. Because of Bugzilla, Mozilla has far more useful features than it otherwise would have. If users hadn't been able to get through to developers I doubt that Mozilla would have popup and image blocking.

Mozilla's release schedule with nightly builds has also been a huge sucess. Mozilla has more people testing very recent versions than any other peice of software I know. Mozilla is now the most stable browser I have ever used, and I don't doubt that the nightly builds (and some talented developers) are the reason.

Hopefully now that Mozilla is very popular it will attract enough outside developers so that Netscape's original dream of no cost development to win the browser war. There are still some hurdles for developers though. Mozilla is a complicated project with a significant learning curve. It relies on some specific technologies such as XUL and XCOM which don't yet have large numbers of developers.

They assumed that developers would flock to the open source development effort. Netscape was looking to win the browser war without spending any money.

They didn't assume, they hoped, big difference. They also weren't looking to _win_ the browser war, they were looking to keep from being completely flushed away. It was an act of desperation. In certain ways it has succeeded as someone else mentioned, it is at least in a position of it's existence not being totally tied to a single company (i.e. now th

Open sourcing Mozilla was an act of desperation, and I'm sure glad Netscape went ahead and did it. After 5 years, Mozilla has a number of outside developers working on it. I read interviews with the thinkers in Netscape that were expecting to have their browser developed for them by open source developers and considerable cost saving. It certainly hasn't happened easily or quickly, but I think that Mozilla is at a point that it wouldn't die even if AOL pulled all support and funding from it.

No but it's stil better then burying your product forever. This way you can at least throw it into OSS and hope that one it becomes a thorn in your competitors (read MS) side. In other words it's the final finger before MS kills you and eats you.

For better or worse, other companies looking to open source their products have a data point. I'm hoping to see many other closed source products become open source and I'm hoping they have learned from Mozilla. It's not an easy road.

But one of the reasons that failing companies DON'T go this route is that usually one of the few assets they have that might be attractive to a suitor is their code. To open source it at that late a stage usually will guarantee that no one will buy you out (just try gettin

Everytime I try to view one of Google News's subsections (World, Entertainment, Business, etc), Mozilla locks up, and takes down the entire operating system too (seems like the entire file system stops responding after a minute or so), forcing a hard reboot. Every single last time.

I'm using Windows ME, and the latest version of Mozilla (1.3).

Does this happen to anyone else?

Here is a link to the World section you can try (SAVE YOUR WORK BEFORE IN CASE!):

Try blowing away your cache, I have found that sometimes lesser OS's have problems with a particular file and cause all sorts of bad things to happen when they are accessed. It just so happens that web browsers caches are a prime candidate for these are there are so many file saves/deletes in the directory.

However, with 1.3, I've found one problem. It seems that the "Open Unrequested Windows" option for javascript (used to block popups) is missing now. I haven't been able to find it on new installations to turn it off.

If anyone knows where it moved to (or if I'm just hallucinating), please let me know.

The way it works has been changed slightly, too; now you can choose to either allow or suppress popups, and provide a list of exceptions. Whenever it suppresses a popup, it displays a little icon in the bottom right that you can click to allow it. I find this to be a little annoying, because I've really found that the only popups I ever got with the "unrequested" option were ones I wanted anyway, and now I have to allow them all...

The following message should be appearing in the Mozilla newsgroups any time now:

A few minutes ago, at 13:11 PST on 2003-03-31, the 200,000th bug was filed in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000 00

Rather fittingly, it was filed by Chris Hofmann, head honcho of Netscape's embedding team and staunch Mozilla supporter, and is titled "joke of the day spam mail crash". (Note: please don't mess with the bug.)

Consulting my records, I see that the closest guess to the actual date and time was made by:

1st: 2003-04-01 00:00:01 bradangelcyk@hotmail.com (10 hrs, 50 mins)

a mere 10 hours and 50 minutes out. Congratulations to him; he wins a Mozilla 1.0 CD if he sends me his address.

Not every entry had an equal chance of winning the prize. Nine people submitted dates which were before the contest started (clue: this year is 2003, chaps, not 2002), and several people thought we were going to file 20,000 bugs in a matter of about a week. One person thought that he'd get away from the crowd by guessing a date in the 13th month of 2003 (what does he know that we don't?), and the furthest out two guesses had us still struggling towards the mark this time next year.

no, 1.4a hasn't been released yet. It's not on the release page [mozilla.org] anyway.

Speaking of that page, I'd like to know why they keep old 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 alpha and beta releases around. Shouldn't they take those down after the final releases? I mean, who in tarnation is going to download 1.1a? Even if you want to keep them on an FTP server somewhere, at least take them off the Releases page.

One thing I hate.. but I can't all it a bug is that when I open a link in a new window or tab and it fails to connect, the browser shows a stupid dialog box and the URL of that page is about:blank.
This way I can't refresh because I lost the URL.Sometimes I open several tabs and I need to know which links correspond to the failed windows so that I can reopen.I think IE tries to connect twice before failing.

The solution should be a selectable option of:A: Display the blank pageB: Blank page with your URL set as a linkC: No connection page but still has your URL in the location bar.D: Some fancy page you would like; in particular a search engin with the URL in the search field. This should be customized so you can say the web form variable X will contain the URL or better yet be able break it down to some componets as well.

"I love how Netscape, since they own the rights to the Mozilla code, uses it directly for their browser"

Netscape doesn't "own the rights to the Mozilla code". They are the copyright holder to some of it. But so are scores of people not employed by Netscape. Mozilla is available under the terms of the MPL, the GPL or the LGPL and that means that anyone can use and modify the code and the kind of ownership you're suggesting just doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

" A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use."

It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.

Don't get me wrong, Mozilla's a wonderful tool for the interent. I'm glad to see IE getting a run for its money. I just don't feel that any myths were shattered here.

1.) It took aaaaaaaaages.

2.) For the most part, the hard work was done and the tough decisions were made. Mozilla wasn't exactly paving the way for the internet as we see it today.

3.) It was necessary. Linux needed a AAA browser. If a good browser for Linux wasn't in demand, how far would it have gone?

I guess what I'm saying is that it's a logical evolution, not necessarily a challenge for the community. Get the community to put together an ambitious game, then we'll shatter a few myths.

"Faulty logic. Just because it was usable to you doesn't mean it was ready to ship. They obviously care or they wouldn't have waited so long for v1 to ship."

It is not a product. It is not for sale. It never shipped. It's an open source product. You use it if it's useful to you. To me mozilla was useful two years ago and it got better and faster with every release including the latest 1.3 version.

So what? It was usable already. If they were Microsoft, they would have just slapped a "version 5" label on it, and then a "version 5.5" label on it, at equivalent stages of development. In fact, thats exactly what Microsoft did. If you really think that a "Version 5.5" from MS means more than a "version 0.9.3 pre-release" from the Mozilla team, then you place way too much stock in version numbers... version numbers are just for marketing in this industry, don't place so much importance on them.

It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.

Version numbers don't mean much. Look at it in this light: even though Mozilla is "version 1", it is functionally / feature-wise pretty much on par with Internet Explorer "version 6". And the stability of the one or two years worth of betas leading up to version 1 was also not all that different to the stability of IE version 5 and 5.5.

Personally I think they should have just called Mozilla 1 "Mozilla 6". At least it would provide a more accurate representation of the level of quality of the product as compared to other similar products, to all those people out there who seem to think a version number means anything ("What? They're only at version 1 now? Ha, IE is at version 6").

i think mozilla while a great engine in geko dropped the ball.. the fact that apple chose khtml over geko is really something they shoudl think about. The mozilla team should have focused on getting something that *works well* out then adding features and not the other way around. oh yeah and the red star communst logo is really sad.

I think the fact that apple chose khtml over gecko speaks more to apples goals than it does the the comparitive quality of the two engines. Though I agree that mozilla's development focus should be more toward quality than 'quantity', I happily use mozilla, and it *works well* for me.

Mozilla is a lot of things, including my primary browser across three platforms.

However whenever I point out the lack of "completeness" especially with regards to documentation and formalisation of a product, I'm reminded (usually quite gently, bless the developers) that mozilla isn't and never was intended to be a complete browser. I'm told it's intended as a code base, a core for others to use, but it's not supposed to be a feature-and-docum

I think that's exactly what Phoenix [mozilla.org] is. Everyone I've introduced to Phoenix has adopted it, including a few non-techies in their late-40s. Pop-up blocking/whitelisting and tabbed browsing are "killer" features, and IE will eventually adopt them or face a serious reduction in usage.

The Mozilla suite is great and all, but, IMO, the primary benefit of the project is as a codebase for other projects, such as Phoenix, Camino, Minotaur/Thunderbird, etc.

http://www.konqueror.org
http://www.apple.com/safari
Seriously.
Do you work for Opera Software or something? Your other post was also a plug for Opera.
Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom. Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware. It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.
And Mozilla is an IE killer in my opinion. It has some great features

Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom.

That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.

Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware.

The banner is only "huge" if you're running at 640x480... And it's not scumware, either; the browser reports no information about your computer to Opera. You can also customize what types of banners are shown; in fact, I have a friend who paid for Opera and actually keeps the banner on because he frequently sees banners for products he's interested in.

It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.

I can't say about Safari, since I can't use it, but Opera 7 is still the fastest browser I've used, and 6 is only marginally slower. "Capable" is a relative term, but I've yet to see another browser that has features such as integrated mouse gestures (gotta have a plugin for Mozilla), a quick-preference menu (pressing F12 brings up a list of the most handy preferences), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).

It also has better user-defined CSS support than other browsers I've seen. It even comes with a number of pre-defined CSS layouts that do interesting things such as emulate text-only browsers, outline structural elements on a page, remove tables, hide only non-linking images, and so forth. Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe one of the Mozilla offshoots can do this, but I haven't seen any other browser).

That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.

It is not them making proprietary software that infringes on my freedom. It is me using proprietary software that infringes on my freedom. I don't have the freedom to understand what it is doing. I don't have the freedom to bug fix or modify it. And with most EULA's, I lose even more freedoms.

Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe o

Agreed. I exclusively use OpenOffice and Mozilla. I'd also be using exclusively linux, but I've got some issues with programs necessary for school (Matlab, Mathematica, etc...) as well as a printer that only does Windows.:-/

I agree. Much better than having the difference between version 6 and version 7 being significantly less than the difference between version 4 and version 6.

Seriously, it's like a race to see who can have the highest version number sometimes. That doesn't impress me. This is almost as bad as the MHz myth. Internet Explorer is still at version 6, and people like it.

I upgraded from Netscape 4.7x as my email client. The email client had all the features I wanted, and everything worked great. I decided to upgrade to Mozilla 1.2.x and most things have worked. Grabbed the spellchecker plugin and gpg, all set.

Only problems I have now, is I want to use Mozilla 1.2.x for email, and also run 1.4 to support and bugcheck. Pain in the ASS. Trying to switch back and forth is a headache. And I dont want to move my data from 2 different versions.

The way I see it, Mozilla and Opera fills a valuable role as the browser that comes out with leading edge/bleeding edge features first. Netscape incorporates what's in Mozilla shortly after they're proven, and then MSIE scrambles to catch up with Mozilla. I'm not disappointed that it doesn't have a big chunk of the desktop; what I'm disappointed in is the courts and the government, who haven't done the job of restraining Microsoft in its attempts to wreck the competition. Anyhow, I am loving Mozilla 1.3: